It is not hard to understand why the Allied bombings continue to raise moral questions and emotional responses. Through my family, I am familiar with the personal memories of people who experienced the bombings. My father, who was two years old at the time, experienced the large-scale attack on Kassel in a bomb shelter in October 1943, together with his mother, older brother and two sisters. Their house was the only one in their street still standing. My aunts and uncle clearly recall the image of the largely destroyed and smoldering city landscape.

Such stories are part of numerous German family memories. They remind us that for Germans – and especially for the generation that directly experienced the war – writing about the bombings was always in some way connected to personal experiences. The German historians whose work I analyze in this book only rarely reflected on their personal relationship with the subject they wrote about: they largely maintained a self image of objectiveness in which reflections on their personal experiences had no place. I, however, am convinced that their seemingly ‘detached’ and historical narratives were very strongly connected to memory and identity issues: to the refusal of being seen as a perpetrator in the light of the experience of suffering.

By choosing this angle of historiographical analysis, I refrain from directly passing moral judgments on the morality of bombing myself. Instead, I critically reflect on the often one-sided way in which German historians wrote about this subject and especially on those authors who have used the Allied bombings to downplay the significance of the Genocide that was carried out by Nazi Germany. However, this does not mean that I feel that the bombing of German cities is not problematic from a moral point of view or that I am not affected by the horrible stories of suffering I have encountered while reading these accounts.

While the reader might readjust or nuance his or her moral view on the Allied bombings and the way they were discussed after the war by reading about the debates and conflicting perspectives, this is not my primary aim. The present study is motivated by a strong interest in the way Germans and especially historians have attempted to come to terms with Nazism and the Second World War.